Talking dirty in China

Beijing has been producing daily pollution reports since 1999. Even so, until recently officials went on referring to this soul-sapping grey pall as wu, or “fog”, a word that sounded more benign in weather reports. Residents have tended to follow suit, even though their semi-desert climate is too dry much of the year for fog, produced by water vapour near the ground.
When the city finally steeled itself last month to introduce warnings specifically for “haze”, produced by pollutant particles suspended in the air.
The quality of the city air is attracting more attention thanks mainly to the Olympic Games, which open in Beijing in August 2008. A 500-day countdown starts on March 27th. The games will be held at a time of year when the city climate can be unbearably hot and also very humid, even without the haze.
International scrutiny is certainly helping. Without the Olympics, it is unlikely that Beijing would be trying at all hard to curb atmospheric pollution.
The general result of all this is a popular awareness of environmental health threats so low that even the vocabulary is unfamiliar. Beijing’s citizens now know that they have haze. It may be a long time yet before they see it dispelled.

Material Shows Weakening of Climate Reports

A House committee released documents Monday that showed hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.
Across NASA, researchers and career public affairs workers spoke up to alert The New York Times to rising political interference with the flow of science news to the public. A week after The Times’s first story, Michael Griffin, the NASA administrator, issued a statement "on scientific opennness" to the agency's 19,000 employees saying changes would be made.
In a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the official, Philip A. Cooney, who left government in 2005, defended the changes he had made in government reports over several years. Mr. Cooney said the editing was part of the normal White House review process and reflected findings in a climate report written for President Bush by the National Academy of Sciences in 2001.
He was hired by Exxon Mobil after resigning in 2005 following reports on the editing in The New York Times. The White House said his resignation was not related to the disclosures.
Mr. Cooney said his past work opposing restrictions on heat-trapping gases for the oil industry had had no bearing on his actions once he joined the White House. “When I came to the White House,” he testified, “my sole loyalties were to the president and his administration.”
Mr. Cooney, who has no scientific background, said he had based his editing and recommendations on what he had seen in good faith as the “most authoritative and current views of the state of scientific knowledge.”
The hearing also produced the first sworn statements from George C. Deutsch III, who moved in 2005 from the Bush re-election campaign to public affairs jobs at NASA. There he warned career press officers to exert more control over James E. Hansen, the top climate expert at the space agency.
Mr. Deutsch resigned last year after it was disclosed that he had never graduated from Texas A&M University, as his résumé on file at NASA said. He has since completed work for the degree, he said Monday.
Democrats focused on fresh details that committee staff members had compiled showing how Mr. Cooney made hundreds of changes to government climate research plans and reports to Congress on climate that raised a sense of uncertainty about the science.
The documents “appear to portray a systematic White House effort to minimize the significance of climate change,” said a memorandum circulated by the Democrats under the committee chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California.

Students’ Right to Free Speech

The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday in a case that has attracted attention mainly because of its eccentric story line: An Alaska student was suspended from high school in 2002 after he unfurled a banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” while the Olympic torch passed by. But the case raises important issues of freedom of expression and student censorship that go far beyond the words on that banner. The court should affirm the appeals court’s well-reasoned decision that when the school punished the student it violated his First Amendment rights. The principal took it from him, and suspended him for 10 days.
Mr. Frederick says the suspension violated his rights. The school board insists the principal had the right to confiscate the banner and punish the student because the language undermined its teachings about the dangers of illegal drugs. The San Francisco-based United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled for Mr. Frederick, citing the 1969 case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which held that students have the right to free speech, which can be suppressed only when the speech disrupts school activities.
The Bush administration joined the school district in arguing that schools have broad authority to limit talk about drugs because of the importance of keeping drugs away from young people. But if schools can limit speech on any subject deemed to be important, students could soon be punished for talking about the war on terror or the war in Iraq because the government also considers those subjects important.
Some school administrators would no doubt use their power to clamp down on conservative speech while others would clamp down on liberal speech. A school that values diversity could punish students who criticize affirmative action, while a more conservative school could ban students from taking outspoken positions about global warming. Religious groups have joined civil libertarians in backing Mr. Frederick because they fear schools will punish students who talk about their religious beliefs.
If the Supreme Court wants to dodge the free-speech-in-school issues, it could rule that the off-campus Olympic torch event was not a formal school activity — and that the principal had no right to limit anyone’s free speech there. That would not harm students’ free speech rights, but it would also do little to affirm them.
The court should go further, and rule that Mr. Frederick’s rights were infringed. Students do not have the right to interfere substantially with school activities, but Mr. Frederick did not do that. The court should use this case to reaffirm Tinker’s famous pronouncement that students do not shed their right to free speech “at the schoolhouse gate.”